With the advent of the advanced intelligent network (AIN), it has become possible to rapidly design and introduce many new enhanced telecommunications services that provide subscribers with added flexibility and convenience in the use of telephone equipment. Examples of such services are free phone (FPH) services such as time dependent routing, calling card (CCD) services, virtual private network (VPN) services and personal 1-800 services.
In the advanced intelligent network, new services are typically designed in a service creation environment. After a service has been created, it needs to be bundled together, engineered, deployed and initially provisioned before it is capable of carrying live traffic on the network. In operation, the service is further provisioned to add, delete or update subscriber names and information.
Conventional methods for deploying and provisioning a service in an advanced intelligent network suffer several disadvantages. For example, disparate systems generally need to be used to deploy and then provision the service. In addition, the deploying and provisioning systems are node dependent and thus vary on different network elements.